In the pantheon
of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street
banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the
top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed,
and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about
ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional
"right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
Government for a redress of grievances" that he helped to create.

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You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon
Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then
partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that
has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his
own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left
him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his
being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the
internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.

But only in America is the arrogance of the super-rich so perfectly
concealed by the pretense of democracy that the 12th richest man in the
nation can suppress dissent against corporate rapacity and expect his
brutal actions to be viewed not as a means of preserving his own class
privilege but as bureaucratically necessary to providing sanitary
streets.

Even before he ordered the smashing of dissent by citizens peacefully
assembled, Bloomberg denigrated their heartfelt message: "It's fun and
it's cathartic," he said of those huddled against the cold in a
makeshift encampment, "... it's entertaining to go and blame people. ...
It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain
and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to
people who were on the cusp."

It is mind-boggling that Bloomberg still hypes the canard that the
banks were forced to reap enormous profits from toxic securities. It is
an embarrassing, dishonest position when the record of banker fraud in
creating the housing bubble is so well documented in Securities and
Exchange Commission lawsuits. Is Bloomberg unaware that the major banks
have agreed to pay hefty fines in a meager compensation for their
schemes? That he blames the victims of the securitization swindles and
then orders the arrest of those who dare speak the truth is a tribute to
his belief in the enduring power of the big lie.

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If the Bloomberg news service, the stock market idolizer owned by the
mayor, had been anything more than an enabler this past decade of Wall
Street excess, nay criminality, it's possible we would not be
experiencing the current crisis. If this leading financial news outlet
had performed the minimum of journalistic due diligence on unregulated
credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and the other
swindles marketed with an abandon informed by deep deceit and the
financial industry's pervasive corruption, the world economy may not now
be in such terrible shape.

Yet the man whose personal wealth increased by $4.5 billion the first
year of this meltdown when many Americans were losing their life
savings now dares shift blame away from himself and others at the center
of economic power to the most vulnerable among us. Instead of blaming
the Wall Street lobbyists who got the laws changed so that they could
securitize people's home mortgages, no matter how unsound those
mortgages were by design, he blames the folks suckered into accepting
the banks' phony offerings. "Blame the opium addict and not the pusher"
is the excuse for the bankers who turned the lure of easy credit into a
housing bubble that, when it inevitably exploded, impoverished the world
but left the bailed-out Wall Street hustlers richer than ever.

"There's something wrong with a kid who steals a bike going to jail
and someone who steals millions paying a fine," as former New York City
Mayor Ed Koch put it in challenging Bloomberg's blame-the-victims
copout. The fines to which Koch referred represent a small percentage of
the bankers' ill-gotten gains, and, of course, as opposed to the kid
who steals a bike, none of the bankers fined by the SEC has even been
threatened with jail time. "What do you think they got fined for -- schmutz
on the sidewalk?" Koch asked. "They got fined because they abused their
relationship with their clientele. And I want to see somebody -- I want to
see one of them, of a major corporation, punished criminally."

Instead, the people led away in handcuffs are not the bankers who
perpetuated the fraud of turning homes into the junk of toxic mortgages,
which should be judged as criminal, but decent people who have
committed only the "crime" of speaking truth to power.

Robert Scheer is editor in chief of the progressive Internet site Truthdig. He has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy (more...)